`Slavery in Diplomacy: The Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade', is the latest History Note to be published by FCO Historians. It was launched at a seminar on 17 October, during Black History Month, as a key part of the FCO's commemorative activities marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade within the British Empire.

This year's bicentenary has provided ample opportunity for government and public reflection upon Britain's role in the trade and the evils associated with it. In the 150 years preceding 1807 the British were probably responsible for shipping more than 2.6 million captive Africans to the Americas, and until 1833 slavery, the 'accumulated horrors' of which abolitionists labelled 'crimes against humanity', remained legal in Britain's overseas possessions. But during the 19th century the British were also in the forefront of those seeking to outlaw and suppress the trade. Slavers turned abolitionists endeavoured to achieve their end through bilateral and multilateral accords. At the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15 Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, persuaded participants to declare their wish 'to put an end to a scourge which [had] so long desolated Africa, degraded Europe, and afflicted humanity'. His successors resorted to bribery, cajolery and coercion in their efforts to secure international compliance with this aspiration, and the Foreign Office exposed the shortcomings of Britain's neighbours and rivals by waging a campaign of public diplomacy on a scale which has since rarely been equalled. The Royal Navy, its supremacy assured by Nelson's victory at Trafalgar, meanwhile undertook policing operations aimed at eradicating the trade from the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the process the Admiralty globalised humanitarian intervention, and anti-slave trade diplomacy was transformed into what Lord Aberdeen labelled 'a new and vast branch of international relations'.

One major institutional development in the struggle against slave trafficking was the establishment within the Foreign Office of a Slave Trade Department. Indeed, during the 1820s and 1830s it was the Office's largest department, and its first head, James Bandinel, saw his work as an act of reparation owed both to those Africans shipped across the Atlantic and 'to the character which we hold among the nations of the world'. Bandinel's successors were no less determined in prosecuting what they saw as an essentially moral cause. It was with a view to celebrating this enduring commitment to human rights diplomacy that on 17th October the Foreign and Commonwealth Office held a one-day seminar entitled 'Whitehall and the Slave Trade: An enduring commitment to human rights' in London. Hosted by the Office's Historians and its Human Rights, Democracy and Governance Group, the seminar brought together distinguished scholars, diplomats and politicians who, in exploring the past, placed some of the current dilemmas of human rights diplomacy in their historical perspective.

Slavery history note (pdf) is available to view here; free hard copies are available from FCO Historians on request, though we only hold a limited supply.